Blurring the Lines

Recently, I had the great honor of contributing to an anthology of stories inspired by Jane Austen (there's a reason the title of the anthology is Jane Austen Made Me Do It!). There are some wonderful Austenian stories in there by Regency veterans such as Syrie James and Jo Beverly. Having spent a good deal of time in 1804 recently, I decided it would be fun to do something modern, something a little quirky... something involving a team of ghost hunters and a "real" Northanger Abbey. I call it my Scooby-Doo story.

This has now spawned my absolute favorite angry email. My correspondent irately informed me that if I had taken five minutes to Google, as he did, I would have known that Northanger Abbey wasn't a real place. And I should be ashamed of myself. Hmph.

Okay, so he didn't actually say hmph. It was, however, highly implied.

Of course, Northanger Abbey isn't a real place. (As far as I know-- there are more things in heaven and England....) That's the fun of it. Maybe it says something about my lifelong desire to slip into the pages of the books I'm reading, but I've always enjoyed blurring the lines between fiction and fact, incorporating real people and places into fiction, and, on the opposite end, treating fictional people and places as real.

I've played this game before, with my first book, The Secret History of the Pink Carnation, in which the premise was that the Scarlet Pimpernel had been real, and had given rise to a host of other flowery spies, including the Purple Gentian, the Pink Carnation, and their dastardly French foe, the Black Tulip. I once overheard someone solemnly telling a friend that, naturally, I'd made up the Pink Carnation, but everyone knew the Scarlet Pimpernel had been a real person. As a former historian, there's a little fact problem there. As a writer, it de lights me that Baroness Orczy's character has become so real that people believe he existed in the flesh as well as in fiction. (And, to be fair, there was actually a spy running around France under the alias Le Mouron. Sadly, he wasn't Sir Percy Blakeney and he didn't look like Anthony Andrews. In real life, he was French and no one sought him here or there.)

It always thrills me when I come across references to fiction as fact in other peoples' novels. There's an old Regency by Elsie Lee, The Wicked Guardian, in which a character refers disparagingly to "that Blakeney boy" who ran off to play spy in France. Sara Donati incorporates Diana Gabaldon's Claire Fraser in her Into the Wilderness. I was, as you can imagine, over the moon when our own Mary Blayney decided to incorporate my Lord Richard Selwick into her Traitor's Kiss.



How do you feel about fictional people or events being incorporated into fiction as fact?

(And, authors, I know I probably shouldn't ask this, but I can't resist.... What's your favorite angry email?)